A Mitford Sisters First Look: ‘Outrageous’ Takes On the 1930s’ Brilliant, Scandalous Siblings

Can you love someone and hate their politics?

That’s the urgent query threaded through Outrageous, a new drama about the aristocratic and rebellious Mitford sisters that arrives in 2025 on BritBox in the US and on U&Drama in the UK. Those unfamiliar with their story might wonder if a saga about well-born women who had their heyday before and after World War II is all that topical, but given the state of politics and polarization across the world these days, this stranger-than-fiction tale remains deeply relevant.

Outrageous is based on The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Clan, a compelling 2002 doorstopper of a book by Mary S. Lovell about the notorious upper-crust clan.

Sarah Williams, who wrote Outrageous, posed the question about timeliness in an interview. The film and TV writer had been familiar with the work of Nancy Mitford, the eldest sister and a wildly successful author of postwar novels, essays, and biographies. As Williams pointed out, somewhat recognizable versions of the Mitfords have appeared frequently on our screens thanks to Nancy. Just a few years ago, there was another adaptation of her novel The Pursuit of Love, a story of romance and war that includes many incidents and characters drawn from the lives of the Mitfords and their interlocking circles of friends, lovers, and relatives.

But various Mitford memoirs and an eccentric, difficult family history mythologized within engrossing novels are not the whole story. The Pursuit of Love is so amusing, sensitive, and elegant that it remains in print after almost 80 years, but it romanticizes aspects of the family’s history, while flattening or caricaturing some of the events and people that served as Nancy’s inspirations. It’s “a lovely, frivolous tale of non-controversial girls falling in love,” as Williams points out. And of course, “controversial” was a more apt adjective for many of the Mitford siblings for a long time.

Two decades ago, a friend told Williams to read Lovell’s book, because while Nancy’s books are rewarding, “the true story is amazing,” she recalls the friend saying. “I was completely blown away, because here was everything. Love, death, passion, elopements, imprisonment, suicide.” And that’s not even the half of it.

Back when the 20th century was new, Lord and Lady Redesdale, who at first glance appeared to be conventional exemplars of the English upper class, had seven children, six of them girls. Each of those women—aside from the mysterious second-oldest sister, Pamela—became wildly famous, for very different reasons.

Diana married a rich man, Bryan Guinness, before she turned 20, in a 1929 society wedding that transfixed Britain. Just a few years later, she created a huge scandal by leaving him for the married Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, which was at its height during the first half of the 1930s. One of the core stories of Outrageous revolves around the growing fractures between Diana and Nancy, who is increasingly appalled by Mosley and everything he and his followers stand for. All the sisters were close growing up—some closer than others—but it’d be hard for even the most patient sibling to overlook that when the Mosleys got married at Joseph Goebbels’s home in Berlin, Hitler was an honored guest.

“Can you forgive a sister just because she’s a sister? Or do you have to make a decision, which is, no, blood doesn’t run this deep, actually,” observes Bessie Carter (Bridgerton, I Hate Suzie), who plays Nancy.

In fact, Nancy Mitford began to have reservations about publishing her 1935 novel on British fascists, Wigs on the Green, partly because a satiric novel about fascism started to seem less amusing the more the threat of fascism loomed over all of Europe. But despite Diana’s vociferous objections to the book, Nancy could not afford to shelve it. The Mitford women didn’t have major family wealth to draw on, and Nancy needed the money, something her hot cad of a husband generally failed to supply. Nancy, who called Mosley “Sir Ogre,” later allowed the book to go out of print, but the strains between her and her infamous sister remained. Diana, who decades later was “still beautiful and astonishingly unrepentant,” was thought by the authorities to be “far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband” and was jailed during the war as a security threat.

Though they were conventional in certain ways—especially Pamela, a horsewoman who devoutly stayed out of the headlines—the idea that ladies of the upper class weren’t supposed to make a spectacle of themselves was lost on most of the Mitford daughters, who rarely did anything by halves. Debo, the youngest, was overlooked so often she titled her memoir Wait for Me!, but she not only ended up as the Duchess of Devonshire, she helped rescue the legendary Chatsworth estate from looming insolvency, all while raising a family, entertaining the good and the great, and writing many other books.

Any perusal of the many volumes about the family leads to the conclusion that Unity was probably the most intense sister of all (her middle name: Valkyrie). Like other members of the family, she cheerfully traveled to Germany during the 1930s, but Unity also lived there for long periods and socialized within the highest Nazi circles. Not to spoil things for non-Mitfordians, but her life took a series of horrific turns as a result.

The impassioned Jessica—a best-selling journalist and author later in life—was close to Unity growing up, but during the turbulent ’30s, “Decca” went as far as possible in the other direction. She eloped with a distant cousin (who, like the Mitfords, was related to the Churchill family), and they ran off to try to aid the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. No wonder the most well-known statement attributed to their long-suffering mother consisted of the following lament: “Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in a headline, I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.”

“The true story is about political extremism, women being radicalized, and two of them being Fascists, and are we asking our audience to sympathize with that? And of course, we’re not,” says Williams, the sole writer of Outrageous. “I think that nowadays, we look at it as more of a cautionary tale.”

And yet, at least for Mitford heads like me, the contradictions and tensions inherent in the women’s lives—including Lady Redesdale—provide endless food for thought. They were privileged and endured great pain and deep losses; they fought terribly and were often poles apart politically, and yet most never quite decisively cut off any other family member, at least not permanently. The siblings wrote 12,000 letters to each other in their lifetimes.

The sisters would have slayed on social media; as Jessica put it, each was capable of being “a terrific hater.” Without much formal education, several wrote unpretentious, intelligent books. They were fashionable, insouciant, unrepentant rebels at a time when women’s roles were highly constricted; they loved practical jokes, parties, teasing, writing wittily mean letters and funny missives—and yet they took life and their personal relationships very seriously. “They had passionate opinions, and were prepared to go to jail for what they believed in, were prepared to kill themselves for what they believed in,” Williams says. “They were not playing about.”

My mother was the youngest of seven and I had four aunts who deeply influenced the course of my younger life, and the complicated, unresolvable dynamics of a big family was one of the draws for Williams as well. “I’m one of six children, so that’s a big reason why this story fascinates me. But how, of six girls, three could be extremists…how does that happen? And how does a family split apart due to politics, which I’m sure is happening in America just as much as is happening here? People with the same backgrounds, the same genetic inheritance, if you like, can turn out to be vastly different when it comes to politics, and I think that’s fascinating.”

Carter, the daughter of Jim Carter (Downton Abbey) and Imelda Staunton (The Crown), hopes that those who watch or write about Outrageous don’t reach for the most superficial comparisons when talking about this singular family. Rather than saying the sisters recall the Kardashian clan, Carter offers a more apt analogy: Succession.

Like the siblings in the HBO drama, the Mitfords were born into a world of access, influence, and prosperity that was unimaginable to most people. To them, famous politicians, society figures, and powerful individuals weren’t necessarily intimidating; as Carter puts it, those people were simply residents of the “small village” of fame, fortune, and titles that the Mitfords moved in. Like the Roys, Carter points out, the Mitfords had the “incredible confidence which I suppose you could say comes with privilege.” As Williams says, “significant political leaders of the Western world were just minor characters in their story.”

But as Succession demonstrated, people raised in bubbles can be oblivious to the consequences of their actions, and heedless of who may be damaged by the choices they make. At times, the Mitfords were “playing out their bedroom [fights], their childhood traumas between each other, but on this grandiose scale, which had a huge global effect,” says Carter.

And yet, the early part of their lives can, at times, seem aspirational, in large part due to the golden glow those early years were given in Nancy’s books and even in Jessica’s more pointed but somewhat nostalgic memoir, Hons and Rebels.

Seven siblings inventing dozens of nicknames for each other, playing made-up games, tending to their beloved animals, and running about the countryside with little supervision—they were “almost feral,” as Williams puts it. But there was a darker side to this seemingly bucolic existence. At times, these headstrong sisters felt bored and trapped in the boondocks, because Lord Redesdale, a.k.a. “Farve,” played by James Purefoy (Rome, The Veil, Pennyworth), didn’t believe in educating women. Their brother Tom went to Eton of course, but when it came to the girls, Williams notes, Farve “was very anti-school, and he thought hockey playing would lead to thick calves and an aggressive attitude.”

These siblings were “living with a man who was really tough, you know? He was funny. But they’re living in a household with a dictator,” Carter says. “I’m not surprised that Unity and Diana fell in love with dictator figures. You know, it doesn’t take Freud to work that out.”

“Jessica calls it a sort of prison, in those big houses with not much to do other than read, horse ride, or be with the animals that they all loved,” Carter adds. “There’s so much pent-up passion and pent-up energy and intelligence that I feel like they all just needed to funnel into something. And it just so happened that a few of them funneled it into incredibly extremist political parties and views.”

So were limited options and a lack of formal education the cause of the sisters’ dismay and wild choices—choices that were sometimes “abhorrent,” as Williams says—or did those factors spur these women to do something extraordinary or meaningful with their lives? That’s just one of the conundrums of Mitford world.

“In spite of himself, I think [Lord Redesdale] inspired a group of six incredibly confident women who shaped their own lives and moved through the world in a way that almost no other woman did in the ’30s,” Williams noted. “They not only rebelled against what was expected of them, but they had what we would call agency. They went out and got what they wanted. They chose men, they chose their politics, they followed their heart. They were not defined as wives and mothers.”

As for their mother, or “Muv,” she’s played by Anna Chancellor, fresh off a brilliant turn as a formidable aristocrat in another period piece, the delightfully fizzy Amazon Prime comedic drama My Lady Jane. “I was so, so thrilled that we got her,” Williams says. “I really love her, love what she’s doing with it. She herself is great fun, as you would imagine, and super intelligent, just like Bessie is.”

Carter says that at the first read-through, the cast got to meet Lovell, which the actor found very helpful, as the author had spent time with some of the sisters. “One of the things that came across is that they were brought up by a very intelligent mother. She was described as being ‘vague.’ In modern terms, she probably didn’t know how to love her children in the way that we, in our time—we’re all friends with our parents, more often than not.” But Muv’s own mother died when she was young, and in any case, during the early to mid-1930s, the period covered by the debut season of Outrageous, the woman had more than her share of family chaos to deal with.

Casting heavy hitters like Purefoy and Chancellor demonstrates that Outrageous is serious about showing the Mitford parents as complex people who were much more than upper-class twit caricatures. The same goes for the daughters, who, in later years, carefully managed the family image—a curtain Williams hopes to pull aside with this program.

“We’re looking at the characters offstage,” so to speak, Williams says. “Of course when they’re ‘onstage,’ i.e., when they’re writing to each other or when they’re literally on television in their later life, they appear to be complete. They have a mask in place. This series looks under the mask. But even then, there is very, very little self-pity, and I love that about them.”

Williams has mapped out three seasons of Outrageous (though only the first has been commissioned). I observe that the plan makes sense, given that bringing this large array of complicated people and their relationships to life would require “nuance.”

“That is the key word,” Williams answers.

She chose not to depict the women’s childhoods, but to kick things off when Nancy is in her late 20s and the youngest, Debo, is in her early teens. Williams has a “slight aversion to flashbacks,” and in any event, “coming from a big family myself, what I know is that when you all get back together, you all revert to eight years old anyway.”

As the 1930s begin, Nancy is a little adrift, chained to a hopeless romantic relationship, and despite being popular with a huge array of artists, bon vivants, and writers (many of whom stayed lifelong friends), she is not the literary success she later became. But all those factors actually give the audience a pathway into this family full of big personalities. Nancy is “a natural narrator for me,” Williams observes. “She’s perhaps the most politically neutral. She’s the most relatable, I think, for a modern audience. She’s the eldest, so she has a good perspective on the family.”

Though Nancy’s narration frames the episodes—and also, according to Carter, breaks the fourth wall—one thing you won’t hear are exact replicas of the distinctively plummy Mitford accent, which is on display in a 1980 documentary about Nancy. Though Carter found watching that film very helpful, the way the women spoke was so stylized and retro that audiences “might feel removed from” the story. “They had a sort of Mitford twang where it was very, very posh. They had a very specific sort of rhythm and melody to their voice,” Carter says. In that 1980 documentary, Diana says during the war, other volunteers found Nancy’s accent “annoying.”

The problem is, Carter adds, “none of us hear that voice anymore. And if we do, it’s probably through the royals who, you know, half the country don’t care about anymore.… The scripts are so honest and truthful and real, and we want…people to really feel it, and understand that these were real people, not sort of ‘characters’ from the ’30s.”

That desire to depict reality more honestly extended to what the actors wore during production in the Cotswolds, which wraps next month. Costume designer Claire Collins did an “amazing” job depicting “the Swinbrook look.” (Swinbrook was the generally disliked house the family moved to after occupying more beloved rural homes.) There are smart clothes for parties and trips to London, but in the country, there are sweaters with holes in them and “muddy boots—it’s all very lived in,” Carter says.

And of course, there is an array of fine country houses on display. “I thought I’d gone to every single posh house in the United Kingdom on Bridgerton, but I hadn’t!” Carter says with a laugh.

The lovely estates are to be expected, but in many ways, Outrageous is not your typical period piece. Of course, there’s room for every kind of costume drama, and nobody has seen more frivolous, thoughtful, gorgeous, swoony, romantic, and even Gothic ones than me. But viewers who watch a lot of UK period pieces and pay attention to the credits know the following is true: Even if they’re primarily about female characters, they’ve not often had many (or any) women behind the scenes in key creative or producing positions.

On top of that, most costume dramas are far from willing to take on Fascism, socialism, communism, and the class system, among other hot topics. “We’re not going round saying, ‘Would you take a turn around the garden?’” as Carter puts it. “People can stick their noses up and go, ‘Oh, period drama.’ And you just go, ‘This is so much more than a period drama. It’s a political drama. It really is.”

But getting it made was not easy for those very reasons. People “were very wary of that,” Williams says. And a female writer penning a story with this many opinionated women front and center is “certainly is not the norm, and I said very early on that I think if there’d been six brothers, we would’ve seen this show by now.”

After years of trying to get it made with no luck, during the pandemic, Williams had a chat with Elizabeth Kilgarriff of Firebird Pictures, one of the companies behind Outrageous. “She said, ‘Sarah, have you got any other passion projects that you really want to get off the ground?’ Oh, hello!” the writer recalls. “She didn’t really know that much about it, but I gave her the elevator pitch, and she said, ‘Sarah, the weirdest thing is that my head of development is Matthew Mosley, and he is something like the great-great-great-grandson of,’ and it was just the weirdest thing.”

“I think it’s a complicated thing for him, having that inheritance,” Williams continues. “I don’t know very much about it, but I believe both his father and grandfather, as you might expect, reacted very strongly against Oswald’s politics and went very much the other way, but that’s for him to talk about. But he’s been terrific as a producer and completely not stepped forward to offer any political views of any kind.”

But few of us are all that removed from the dynamics that fractured the Mitfords and many other families. The events of Outrageous may have played out nearly a century ago, but they could have been plucked from today’s headlines. I spoke to Carter and Williams shortly after a weekend of violent UK riots that targeted immigrants; there were Nazi salutes and racist rhetoric, then enormous anti-racist counterprotests days later.

“We are doing some scenes this week,” Carter observes, “where some of the lines I’m saying, I don’t have to really act much, because I feel this and I think this.”